The design of the S8 and recently-launched Note8, feature four buttons on the sides of the devices – power/wake-up on the right and; up/down volume and dedicated Bixby button on the left.

An issue irking users was that if the screen was in sleep mode, Bixby was accidentally activated when trying to wake up the device, given that the Bixby button is adjacent to the power button, on a device that looks the same facing up or down.

The Bixby button can be deactivated by accessing the Settings menu within the app and scrolling down to 'Bixby Key'.

Fin24 previously reported that Samsung launched its assistant Bixby with its Galaxy S8 smartphones to help the South Korean giant break into a surging market for voice-activated virtual assistants, which includes Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana.

The Bixby artificial intelligence (AI) personal assistant was designed to assist in completing tasks, talks back to the users and understands texts and voice commands through machine-learning.